SEATTLEFORBARACKOBAMA

I decided to follow my heart and do what I could to learn about what an Obama presidency would mean for this country and started posting on SEATTLEFORBARACKOBAMA.COM in February 2007. HOWIEINSEATTLE.COM will continue to follow progressive Democratic politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back."--"In the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it."--Barack Obama

Monday, June 30, 2008

Olbermann: "Obama’s FISA opportunity" (with video)

The Democratic leadership in the Senate, Republican knuckle-dragging in the same chamber, and the mediocre skills of whoever wrote the final version of the FISA bill, have combined to give Sen. Barack Obama a second chance to make a first impression.

And he damned well better take it. The Senate vote on this tortured and reckless piece of legislation has now been postponed until after the 4th of July break. The Democrats, completing their FISA experience, a collective impression of Homer Simpson falling off a cliff and hitting every bramble on the way down, didn't exactly plan this fortuitous delay.

Last week, the vote on their cave-in was imminent. But, while arguing over a piece of housing legislation, about how many mortgage lenders can dance on the head of a pin, Republicans dithered so long about protecting their constituents, the banks, that the Senate calendar got backed up.

This, in turn, gave Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid some time to think.

There was one among his group, chosen to run for President, who had loudly assailed the idea of handing a get-out-of-jail-free card to corporations who had approached definitional fascism by breaking the law in concert with the Bush Administration.

But this Senator had suddenly realized, that to the large group of voters who operate with an information base that would make Cliffs Notes look like the Encyclopedia, if, in the final vote, he stood against FISA, he would hand them a rock with which they could hit him over the head, a rock wrapped up in a piece of paper reading:

Sen. Reid was kind enough to help you out by composing an amendment that would keep FISA, which you rightly endorse, but strips out the telecom immunity, which you rightly oppose.

It's a protest, a decidedly lame one, but in our daily world of political transactions, voting for the amendment when it has no chance of passing and has been in essence constructed as pure Obama CYA, that is a petty crime.

Whether it will do more to harm your premise of "new politics" than to your credibility as an immunity-opponent, is for you, Senator, to assess.

And live with. It would be sweet to have a pure, politics-free president, but the last of those retired from office in 1797. And while we've all quoted the farewell address of "The Father Of Our Nation" for 211 years now, nobody seems to want to remember that its point was to urge his children that: whatever you do, for God's sake, don't form political parties, some day they will kill you.

Anyway, Senator, your problem here isn't the backlash about telecom immunity, and it isn't really about your political fluidity on the FISA bill.

Your problem is what happens even if this plays out according to plan next week:

* You vote for the anti-immunity amendment * The anti-immunity amendment fails * You vote for the FISA legislation * The FISA legislation passes * Senator: The Republicans still run against you with the 'elections-for-dummies 'message: "Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop."

Because, inside the obscenity that was Charlie Black's comment about how a terrorist attack in this country would be good for his boy John McCain's chances for election.

Inside the inhuman calculation that Benazhir Bhutto did not die in vain, she helped McCain in the New Hampshire primary. There is a sad and cynical reality. The Republicans can scare some of the people all of the time, and they can scare all of the people some of the time. This is all they are right now. Nobody ever said it better than did Aaron Sorkin in his script for the movie "The American President":

"Whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson (and for Rumson, read "McCain") is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it."

Republicans, with almost no exceptions, have no true credibility on counter-terrorism, no track record of prevention or amelioration, and their president can't even remember the name of the skyscraper he claims to have saved in Los Angeles.

And yet, somehow, the Republicans have managed to convince the public that it doesn't matter that Mr. Bush had already completed 22 percent of his first term, when he, his administration, and his party, failed so catastrophically on 9/11.

The President and party who were at fault, were magically transformed into the president and party who would never let it happen again. An unjust... repellant... nefarious, trick. But, politically, rather a neat trick. Senator, the Republicans are going to paint you as soft on terror no matter how you vote on FISA.

Or how you vote on the Telecom Immunity Amendment. Or on the next farm bill. Last week it was Grover Norquist calling you "John Kerry with a tan." By November 1st, it'll be Dick Cheney calling you "Osama Bin Laden with a tan." When you announced your support of this latest FISA bill, with or without the telecom immunity, the Republicans raced to get out a press release accusing you of flip-flopping.

You shared the exact same position, on which they are running their entire campaign and they criticized you anyway!

So, Senator, from their point of view, they think they've got you boxed in. Vote for FISA and you've contradicted yourself. Vote against FISA and it's "Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop." Vote for FISA and against immunity, and it's: political expediency, and Democrats soft on terror, and "Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop." This is a problem, Senator.

Because, flatly, of all the measures that can be taken to aid our damaged nation, and our de-valued constitution, the first, if not the foremost, is not blocking telecom immunity, but making sure no Republican is in the White House past noon next January 20th. Of all the remedial efforts against the Bush Administration's high crimes and misdemeanors, and of all the prophylactic steps against further inroads against the freedoms of the citizens of this nation and the rights of everyone else, the primary step must still come to us through the prism of politics.

Would that it were otherwise. But it ain't. Frankly, Senator, this political tight-rope act you've tried on FISA the last two weeks, which from the outside seems to have been intended to increase the chances of your election, probably hasn't helped in the slightest. There is, fortunately, a possible, a most unexpected, solution. Your second second chance.

Since the final version of the FISA bill was passed down from on high, John Dean has been reading it, and re-reading it, and cross-referencing it with other relevant law, and thinking. Something bothered him about it. Or, more correctly, something didn't bother him about it. Turns out lawyers at the ACLU have been doing the same thing for the last ten days. John compared notes with them, and will be devoting his column at "Find Law" this week, to this unlikely conclusion:

The Republicans who wrote most of this bill at Mr. Bush's urging, managed to immunize the telecoms from civil suits. But not from criminal prosecution. Senator, here is John Dean's summary of his findings, which he sent me this morning. "It is clear not only from the language of the bill which must be read in the context of other, related statutes to be clearly understood, but also from the legislative history, that there is absolutely no criminal immunity for anyone in these FISA amendments."

More over, Senator, it seems as if a lot of people have known this, for a long time."During the January 24th, 2008 debate in the Senate, Sen. Sam Brownback noted, "The immunity provisions would not apply to the Government or Government officials. Cases against the Government regarding the alleged programs would continue. And the provisions would apply only to civil and not criminal cases."

In fact, Senator, just last week, Attorney General Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence McConnell sent a letter, for the record, to House Speaker Pelosi emphasizing that the liability protection, quote, "does not immunize any criminal conduct." And if you ask, Senator, about the President responding to all this by belching out a series of pardons or a blanket pardon to those who broke the law on his behalf, Dean has you covered here, too…

It "would require acceptance by them of the fact that they had broken the law, and thus be an admission of guilt."

"And a blanket pardon would be an admission by Bush that his war on terror has been a lawless undertaking, operating beyond the bounds of the Constitution and statutes that check the powers of the president and the executive branch."

"It would be an admission by Bush, too, of his own criminal culpability which is why Nixon refused to grant his aides a pardon."

Senator, sometimes it is better to be lucky, than good. Keep your eye on the wording of the legislation to make sure the Republicans don't realize its flaws. Then vote for the amendment to strip telecom immunity out of the FISA bill. Then after that fails, vote for the FISA bill, if that's your final answer. Then the minute the president has signed the FISA bill, you announce that you voted for it because it renews FISA and because it permits a bigger prize than just civil suits, that it allows for criminal prosecution of past illegal eavesdropping.

Say, loudly, that your understanding of this bill is such, that if you are elected, your Attorney General will begin a full-scale criminal investigation of the Telecom Companies who collaborated with President Bush in eavesdropping on Americans. And mention that your Attorney General will subpoena such records, notes, e-mail, data, and testimony, from any and all Bush Administration officials, FBI or CIA personnel, or any members of the Executive Branch, who may have as much as breathed in the general direction of these nefarious acts of domestic spying at Mr. Bush's behest.

Wait, you say there's a political hit waiting for you there too? Another "Obama voted uh-uh… thing terror-stop." Actually, Senator, you've already gone down this road, when you spoke to my colleague, Will Bunch, of the Philadelphia Daily News, on April 14th of this year. He asked about the possibility of criminal investigations of the 43rd President and his henchmen.

"What I would want to do," you told him, "is have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out, are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that, because we don't have access to all the material right now."

"You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve."

"Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in cover-ups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is: nobody above the law. And I think that's roughly how I would look at it."

Make this clear, Senator. You've already taken the political hit from the Right, for saying you'd seek to strip out, or rescind immunity. You've already taken the political hit from the Left, for saying you'd vote for the FISA bill even with the immunity. You've paid the political price in advance. Now buy yourself and those who have most ardently supported you something worth more than just class action suits against Verizon.

Explain that you are standing aside on civil immunity, not just for political expediency, but for a greater and more tangible good, the holding to account, of the most-corrupt, the most dangerous, and the most anti-democracy presidential administration in our long history.

Of course, if you disagree with this interpretation, if you think the FISA bill doesn't have the giant loophole, or if you don't think you, as president, would be ready to support criminal prosecution of well, criminals then your duty is clear.

Vote against the FISA bill, if it still carries that immunity. The Republicans are going to call you the names any which way, Senator. They're going to cry regardless, Senator. And as the old line goes: give them something to cry about.

"Michelle Obama has busy summer ahead" (with audio)

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Michelle Obama described a roundtable here the other day as "our version of The View," then proceeded to play moderator and questioner on a serious, political version of the ABC chatfest.

Stump speeches and get-out-the-vote rallies are so yesterday.

This summer, the primaries finally over, Obama is filling in her schedule with events that underscore her roles as girlfriend and working mom.

Some recent activities — the roundtable, an appearance on The View, a speech to an advocacy group for children and families — are similar to what she's been doing for months. But there are more events like that now, since the schedule has loosened up. And they're getting more attention now that her husband, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

The result, by accident or design, is that Obama's softer side is on display when she needs it to be: after a winter of edgy remarks that made her a lightning rod and gave ammunition to Republican John McCain and his allies.

At the discussion here, as an audience of 300 looked on, Obama heard from a hard-pressed theology student with three children, a YWCA director lamenting a decline in social services and a teacher who said kids are coming to class too hungry to learn.

"These roundtables are where the information comes, where the stories come from," Obama says later in an interview with USA TODAY. She says she'll do more of them, especially with military families whose tales are often "heartbreaking."

In a wide-ranging session around a snack-laden table at a hotel here, Obama previewed the style and substance she would bring to the White House. She talked about motherhood and what it's like to be a political target. She was jokey and friendly and not shy about challenging questions she didn't like.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Obama is on leave from her job as an administrator at the University of Chicago hospital, where she was charged with improving relations between the hospital and the community around it. She campaigns for her husband on day trips, returning to Chicago at night to be with their two daughters, ages 7 and 9.

Expect to see more of her and the kids this summer, Obama says, when they'll turn on-the-road-time into "family time." That will stop when school starts.

"We don't pull them out of their world," Obama says. "Our kids thrive on stability and consistency, and they like their routine."

In the interview, Obama talks about keeping fit, her wardrobe and other details of daily life. Some tidbits:

• How she relaxes. She takes her daughters to soccer, tennis, swimming and play dates. "That tends to relax me," she says. "I'm usually doing it with other moms who have been friends, and we gossip and catch up and watch the kids play."

• Her workout routine. It's 90 minutes long, and she does it up to four times a week depending on her travel schedule. It includes cardio, free weights, treadmill, stair-walking and other activities. "Nobody's asked that," she teases. "This is a scoop."

• What else she does when she's not campaigning. "I sleep."

• Fashion tips. "Wear what you like," advises the 5-foot-11 Obama, who is wearing a low-cut gray and white dress with an elegant gray sweater. On The View, she said she never wears pantyhose, but she'd like to clarify that: She wears them "for special occasions or for cold weather."

• Date nights. "Barack and I don't have interesting lives, never did. We're basically family people. When we go on a date, it's either dinner or a movie because we can't stay awake for both," she says. Dates now include the Secret Service. "They give us our space," she says.

Discussing her life as a mother and wife, Obama sounds nothing like the woman conservatives describe as whiny (Peter Schweizer in National Review) and her husband's "bitter half" (Michelle Malkin on her blog).

Evelyn Simien, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut, says the stereotype of black women is that "we're angry, even if we have a smile on our face." She says Obama is wise to stress her "Suzy Homemaker side" because "it's the side that married women can relate to. She's got to be strategic."

Will it work? John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and author of The Art of Political Warfare, says Obama "invited some of this scrutiny" with her comment about not being "really proud" of her country until now. "That was catnip to opposition researchers," he says, and has defined her image so far.

Her current activities play more to her strengths, he says, and her husband's defense of her — "lay off my wife," he said on ABC in May — could also help.

Obama says her campaign plans do not include worrying about what people say about her.

"This election is not about Michelle Obama and it's not about Barack Obama and it wasn't about Hillary Clinton," she says. "It's about people needing universal health care and really wanting this war to end."

"Obama Network Organizes and Revolts Over Spying"

Barack Obama tapped his sizeable grassroots network on Saturday, coordinating over 4,000 "Unite for Change" meetups across the country through the campaign's social networking portal, MyBo.

At the same time, however, other supporters worked furiously over the weekend to organize a new MyBo campaign to protest and pressure Obama. Many activists are outraged by the Senator's recent announcement that he will back a controversial bill to grant the Executive more spying powers and immunize telephone companies accused of illegal surveillance. Both efforts demonstrate how Obama's national network, which broke fundraising records and turned the first term Senator into an unlikely presidential nominee, can respond to top-down edicts and spring into action for self-organized protests.

Since launching last week, the protest group, "Senator Obama Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right," swelled to one of the ten largest campaign groups on Sunday. (FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the Democratic Congress is poised to amend under White House pressure.) It is the largest group of its kind on MyBo, which focuses on local networking, official campaign events, and constituency groups like "Women for Obama." It looks like the group grew through the Obama network, with a few web mentions on liberal sites such as OpenLeft and TPM, and it urges Obama to reject the "politics of fear" and lead Democrats to oppose the White House bill. Blogger Mike Stark says the effort demonstrates the kind of civic engagement and "open government" that Obama espouses, even if it delivers the "sting of social networking" pushback during a tight campaign.

One Democratic Internet consultant predicted that Obama's reaction could reveal his commitment to meaningful engagement with supporters. "How Obama responds will tell us a great deal about both his willingness to listen to input from his supporters and what influence the MyBarackObama community has on the campaign itself," said the operative, who wished to remain anonymous while working on another campaign. "In the meantime, this is a huge opportunity for Obama's supporters to organize around an issue, not just the candidate, and take action beyond using their credit card."

There's no way to know whether the criticism resonates with the hardcore activists who gathered at Saturday's official events. The 4,000 meetups, which drew guests from MyBo and local networks offline, generated overwhelming interest. Though barely covered by the mainstream media, the gatherings suggest another edge for Obama's Internet organizing. The campaign reported over 200 events in the pivotal state of Ohio alone, where middle-aged voters like Cheryl Wright, of Boardman, hosted students and neighbors in her living room. Back in bluer territory, Patrick Callahan, a 31-year-old Brooklyn educator, drew about 35 people to a meetup barbeque. He said about half of the guests were his friends, and half were strangers who found him through MyBo. In a completely anecdotal sample, one attendee told me that Obama's surveillance stance was disappointing, while several others said they had not heard of the issue. Callahan, who learned of the "Unite for Change" meetups from a campaign email, said he was willing to throw open his home to strangers because he backed Obama's positions on education and foreign policy, while McCain wants to stay "in Iraq for at least the next 100 years."

Obama's official events obviously beat the MyBo protests by several orders of magnitude, and the campaign deserves credit for hosting the very technology people are using to organize and pressure the candidate. Obama won the nomination by blending the practical and the ideal -- riding the financial juggernaut of Internet politics and promising a new, interactive civil society along the way. He made people feel good, and connected, and they showered his long-shot campaign with money, energy and adulation. Their votes are already in the bag, in general election calculus, but their work, enthusiasm and contributions to any larger "movement" are not guaranteed. Just as the campaign worked to mobilize so many supporters this weekend, it may have to reengage supporters concerned about Obama's recent drift. He could answer their arguments with a direct video explaining his vision for restoring the rule of the law and constitutional rights. Granting more unchecked surveillance power to the Executive and sidelining judicial oversight is a staggering affirmation of Bush's approach, especially coming from the candidate of change.

If Obama is going to stand by that failed policy, he should at least explain his thinking in depth. It might even get more hits than a fundraising video.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

"Confident Obama maps out his landslide"

Is Barack Obama getting cocky – or just ambitious? In the latest attempt at an anti-Obama message that might stick, the arch Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote last week: “Many candidates have measured the Oval Office drapes prematurely. But Barack Obama is the first to redesign the presidential seal before the election . . . Such arrogance – even self-centredness – has featured often in the Obama campaign.”

Arrogance – or the kind of realigning ambition Rove once admired in the young George W Bush? On the negative side, the Obama campaign has been increasingly remote from the press and it did indeed recently unveil a cringe-inducing version of the presidential seal for a campaign speech.

Obama, moreover, damaged his saintly image by renouncing public campaign financing – which no general election candidate has done since the 1970s – because he is (foolishly?) confident he can raise more money from his own base of supporters. However, his fundraising has dropped somewhat in the postClinton lull. And disappointment on the civil liberties left – after Obama backed a compromise bill for phone-tapping – has sapped enthusiasm in the liberal base.

The ambition is real, though. Obama’s campaign last week revealed a battle plan for contesting 14 states that George Bush won in 2004. Yes, 14. Previous Democratic strategists have focused on one or two – such as Ohio – to tip the race. That was John Kerry’s gamble, and part of the cautious, defensive crouch that Democrats have been used to since Ronald Reagan. Not this time. Obama has sig-nalled that he wants to run hard in conservative New Hampshire, and Bush-won Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada. Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are next on the list. The Obama-ites are even hoping to pick up one electoral vote in Nebraska.

Ambitiously they also intend to assign 15 paid professionals to organise up to 10,000 volunteers in Texas – yes, Texas – for the general election.

“Texas is a great example where we might not be able to win the state, but we want to pay a lot of attention to it,” Obama strategist Steve Hildebrand told Politico.com last week. Congress, it turns out, is key to Obama’s expansive hopes. If he can help Democrats win races for the House and Senate, even if he does not win the state himself, he can be assured of a big congressional majority that would allow him, if elected, to become the transfor-mational president he wants to be.

A “new president alone isn’t enough”, Obama e-mailed to the Democrats’ Senate reelection committee last week. “I’ve served long enough in the US Senate to know that Washing-ton must change, and I also know that big changes don’t happen without big Senate majorities – and right now, Democrats occupy only 49 seats . . . This November, we have a chance to create a Democratic Senate majority like we haven’t seen in decades – but it won’t happen on its own.”

Some of this is what the pros know as a “head-fake”: forcing John McCain to spend money and resources in states he would like to take for granted but will now have to win the hard way. Perhaps the two most surprising ones are Georgia – where a heavy black turnout and a conservative split between McCain and Georgia Libertarian party candidate Bob Barr could make it much closer than it has been in years – and Alaska, where independent voters are leaning towards Obama. Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina are also close for similar reasons.

“We’re going in to win [these states],” Hildebrand insisted. And this may not be a total delusion. Two polls have just put Obama a hefty 15 points ahead of McCain (although Gallup shows a resiliently close contest). Plus a raft of new polls in key swing states show big Obama gains in recent weeks. In Minnesota his lead is now an impressive 17 points; in Wisconsin 13 points; in Michigan six points; and in Colorado five.

Moreover, Obama’s safe states appear much safer at this point in the election cycle than McCain’s – and if you factor in recent trends, all of which show steady movement towards Obama, you begin to hit landslide potential. One very reputable polling analyst, Nate Silver of the polling blog FiveThirtyEight, is now inferring a potential Obama win, on current trending data, of 358 electoral college votes to McCain’s 180. That’s a huge win.

Several big demographic factors help to explain this. One is the growing divide among evangelicals between younger, more liberal types and the traditional fire-and-brimstone set. Obama is the first Democrat since 1996 to be more comfortable talking about faith in public than the Republican – and that’s appealing to younger evangelicals who are disenchanted with too much proximity to the Republicans. And the growing Latino vote – which might be critical in the Mountain West – has moved behind Obama in unexpectedly strong fashion. Obama is winning Hispanics by a ratio of more than two to one. Not many expected that a few weeks ago.

Then there’s the self-reinforcing nature of the Obama phenomenon. If he can maintain the enthusiasm of his core support among blacks and the young it could snowball. One analysis shows that just a 10% increase in black or youth turnout, compared with 2004, could put Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Nevada easily within reach.

Currently Obama is ahead in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the two states that the Clintons insisted he could never win. To make matters worse for McCain, only 34% of Republicans have a “very favourable” view of him, compared with 56% of Democrats for Obama. That enthusiasm gap could prove critical in November.

It’s worth noting that no Democrat has shown this big a lead over his Republican rival in most polls in June since Michael Dukakis. At this point in 2004 Kerry was beating Bush by six, not 15, and Gore was even with Bush in 2000. The dose of cold water is of course the memory of Dukakis, who was beating the first George Bush by 18 points at this stage in 1988, but lost badly in the autumn.

However, Dukakis was up against an incumbent vice-president effectively running for Reagan’s third term. Obama is up against a Republican brand that is toxic and an incumbent president who has a 23% approval rating. Add the flattening economy to the mix and you can see why Obama is thinking big.

Maybe it is hubris. One of Obama’s weak spots is his considerable self-regard. A little too much confidence on his part also plays to McCain’s natural strength: as a scrappy, underappreciated, authentic underdog.

But the underdog may need a little more bite than McCain currently has. Sometimes candidates are cocky for a reason. And behind Obama’s cockiness is a steely ambition that has already upended the formidable Clintons. I wouldn’t bet against him.

"The baseless, and failed, "Move to the Center" cliche" (with video)

Republican Nancy Johnson of Connecticut was first elected to Congress in 1982, and proceeded to win re-election 11 consecutive times, often quite easily. In 2004, she defeated her Democratic challenger by 22 points. The district is historically Republican, and split its vote 49-49 for Bush and Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

In 2006, Rep. Johnson was challenged by a 31-year-old Democrat, Chris Murphy, who ran on a platform of, among other things, ending the Iraq War, opposing Bush policies on eavesdropping and torture, and rejecting what he called the "false choice between war and civil liberties." Johnson outspent her Democratic challenger by a couple million dollars, and based her campaign on fear-mongering ads focusing on Murphy's opposition to warrantless eavesdropping, such as this one:

Rep. Nancy Johnson, a 12-term Republican who ran a tough-on-terror campaign and touted her co-authorship of the Medicare prescription drug legislation, lost her re-election bid Tuesday to anti-war Democrat Chris Murphy.

Murphy had 56 percent to Johnson's 44 percent with 12 percent of the precincts voting. Johnson was the longest serving representative in Congress in state history.

Despite continuing to represent a tough, split district, Rep. Murphy -- as he runs for re-election for the first time -- recently voted against passage of the FISA/telecom amnesty bill, obviously unafraid that such Terrorism fear-mongering works any longer.

That pattern has repeated itself over and over. In the 2006 midterm election, Karl Rove repeatedly made clear that the GOP strategy rested on making two National Security issues front and center in the midterm campaign: Democrats' opposition to warrantless eavesdropping and their opposition to "enhanced interrogation techniques" against Terrorists. Not only did the Democrats swat away those tactics, taking away control of both houses of Congress in 2006, but more unusually, not a single Democratic incumbent in either the House or Senate -- not one -- lost an election.

With Rove's National Security, Terrorist-fear-mongering campaign, huge numbers of GOP incumbents were removed from office and replaced with Democratic newcomers. Voters were simply impervious to claims that Democrats should be denied power because their opposition to eavesdropping and torture made them Soft on Terror. Earlier this year, Bill Foster made opposition to the Iraq War a centerpiece of his campaign -- and emphatically opposed both warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity -- and then won a special election to replace Denny Hastert in his bright red Illinois district.

As the 2008 election approaches, the Democrats' position has strengthened further still. In fact, in attempting to determine the best targets for the $325,000 we have raised so far to target Bush-enabling Democrats in Congress, the most difficult obstacle by far has been to find even a single Democratic incumbent who is vulnerable. Not only does it appear that they all are likely to be re-elected, it's actually difficult to identify ones who have any real chance of losing. That's how weakened the GOP brand is and how vehemently the country has rejected their ideology and politics -- in every realm, including national security.

* * * * *

So what, then, is the basis for the almost-unanimously held Beltway conventional view that Democrats generally, and Barack Obama particularly, will be politically endangered unless they adopt the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and National Security, which -- for some reason -- is called "moving to the Center"? There doesn't appear to be any basis for that view. It's just an unexamined relic from past times, the immovable, uncritical assumption of Beltway strategists and pundits who can't accept that it isn't 1972 anymore -- or even 2002.

Beyond its obsolescence, this "move-to-the-center" cliché ignores the extraordinary political climate prevailing in this country, in which more than 8 out of 10 Americans believe the Government is fundamentally on the wrong track and the current President is one of the most unpopular in American history, if not the most unpopular. The very idea that Bush/Cheney policies are the "center," or that one must move towards their approach in order to succeed, ignores the extreme shifts in public opinion generally regarding how our country has been governed over the last seven years.

One could argue that national security plays a larger role in presidential elections than in Congressional races, and that very well may be. But was John Kerry's narrow 2004 loss to George Bush due to the perception that Kerry -- who ran as fast as he could towards the mythical Center -- was Soft on Terrorism? Or was it due to the understandable belief that his rush to the Center meant that he stood for nothing, that he was afraid of his own views -- the real hallmark, the very definition, of weakness?

By the time of the 2004 election, huge numbers of Americans already turned against Bush's position on the War and ceased trusting him even in the realm of National Security. Thus, the defining claim of Bush's 2004 acceptance speech at the GOP Convention -- the central distinction he drew between himself and Kerry -- was not that his National Security views were right, but rather, was this:

This election will also determine how America responds to the continuing danger of terrorism -- and you know where I stand. . . . In the last four years, you and I have come to know each other. Even when we don't agree, at least you know what I believe and where I stand.

Bush's ability to project "Strength" came not from advocacy of specific policies, but from his claim to stand by his beliefs even when they were politically unpopular.

What's most amazing about the unexamined premise that Democrats must "move to the Center" (i.e., adopt GOP views) is that this is the same advice Democrats have been following over and over and which keeps leading to their abject failure. It's the advice Kerry followed in 2004. It's why Democrats rejected Howard Dean and chose John Kerry instead.

And in 2002, huge numbers of Congressional Democrats voted to authorize the attack on Iraq based on this same premise that doing so would enable them to avoid looking Weak on National Security. The GOP then based its whole 2002 campaign on attacking Democrats as Weak on National Security and the Democrats were crushed -- because, having accepted rather than debated the GOP premises, there was no way to challenge GOP National Security arguments. What makes Democrats look weak is their patent fear of standing by their own views. A Washington Post article last week on Obama's move to the center included this insight:

"American voters tend to reward politicians who take clear stands," said David Sirota, a former Democratic aide on Capitol Hill and author of the new populist-themed book "The Uprising." "When Obama takes these mushy positions, it could speak to a character issue. Voters that don't pay a lot of attention look at one thing: 'Does the guy believe in something?' They may be saying the guy is afraid of his own shadow."

The central problem is that if Democrats embrace the GOP framework of National Security -- that "Strength" means what the GOP says it means -- then that framework gets enforced and perpetuated, and it's a framework within which Democrats can't possibly win, because Republicans will always "out-Strength" Democrats within that framework. It's only by challenging and disputing the underlying premises can Democrats change the way that "strength" and "weakness" are understood.

The Democrats had such a smashing victory in 2006 because -- for the first time in a long time, and really despite themselves -- there was a perception (rightly or wrongly) that they actually stood for something different than the GOP in National Security (an end to the War in Iraq). Drawing a clear distinction with the deeply unpopular GOP is how Democrats look strong. The advice that they should "move to the center" and copy Republicans is guaranteed to make them look weak -- because it is weak. It's the definition of weakness.

The most distinctive and potent -- one could even say exciting -- aspect of Obama's campaign had been his aggressive refusal to accept GOP pieties on National Security, his insistence that the GOP would lose -- and should lose -- debates over who is "stronger" and more "patriotic" and who will keep us more safe. The widely-celebrated foreign policy memo written by Obama's adviser, Samantha Power, heaped scorn on Washington's national security "conventional wisdom," emphasizing how weak and vulnerable it has made the U.S. When Obama took that approach, he appeared to be, and in fact was, resolute and unapologetic in defending his own views -- the very attributes that define "strength."

The advice he's getting, and apparently beginning to follow, is now the opposite: that he should shed his prior beliefs in favor of the amorphous, fuzzy, conventional GOP-leaning Center, that he should cease to insist on a re-examination of National Security premises and instead live within the GOP framework. That's likely to lead to many things, but a perception of strength isn't one of them. One of the very few things in the universe with a worse track record than America's dominant Foreign Policy Community is the central religious belief of the Democratic consultant class and Beltway punditry that Democrats, to be successful, must shed their own beliefs and "move to the Center."

* * * * *

As a brief follow-up to the Keith-Olbermann-promoted claim that Obama's support for the FISA bill is justifiable not only because it lets him avoid being depicted as "soft on terror," but also because it leaves open the possibility that Obama can criminally prosecute telecoms once he's President, NPR correspondent Daniel Schorr said last January that he "can imagine Mr. Bush, if nothing else avails, issuing a blanket pardon for phone companies that may have broken the law." As I pointed out on Friday, a Bush pardon would completely foreclose any Secret Plan to prosecute the telecoms criminally, even if Obama really did harbor such a plan and intended to execute it (despite never having even hinted at any such thing). On Friday, Olbermann announced that he intends to deliver a "Special Comment" on Monday's show to elaborate on his "Obama/FISA" defense. When doing so, he should address this rather towering defect in his Obama-defending theory.

UPDATE: To clarify, I'm not making an argument here about why Democrats (including Obama) "really" support Bush policies in terms of their "true motives." The term "Democrats," even when confined to those in Congress, includes several hundred individuals, and their motives can't be discussed monolithically.

Many Democrats support Bush policies because they believe in them. Others don't believe in them but are persuaded that they must support them in order to be re-elected. Still others have no beliefs at all other than their own re-election and do whatever they perceive is most likely to achieve that. Here, I'm simply taking the political argument at face value -- that Democrats must "move to the Center" in order to win -- and arguing why that's empirically false.

Howie P.S.: This post is being discussed today by some in the Obama nation, with opinion divided.One question I have is whether tactics are driving policy or whether the dynamics of each particular issue is leading to a particular tactic, rather than a permanent, ideological shift by Obama. There is also some chatter in the press that his recent positions are "undercuting his brand."Barack Obama

Saturday, June 28, 2008

"Obama Supporters Take His Middle Name as Their Own"

Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father.

“Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads.

With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by informally adopting his middle name.

The result is a group of unlikely-sounding Husseins: Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian and Italian-American, from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Okla., to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.

Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as “D. Hussein O’Maley.” Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.

Mr. Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim. Hussein is a family name inherited from a Kenyan father he barely knew, who was born a Muslim and died an atheist. But the name has become a political liability. Some critics on cable television talk shows dwell on it, while others, on blogs or in e-mail messages, use it to falsely assert that Mr. Obama is a Muslim or, more fantastically, a terrorist.

“I am sick of Republicans pronouncing Barack Obama’s name like it was some sort of cuss word,” Mr. Strabone wrote in a manifesto titled “We Are All Hussein” that he posted on his own blog and on dailykos.com.

So like the residents of Billings, Mont., who reacted to a series of anti-Semitic incidents in 1993 with a townwide display of menorahs in their front windows, these supporters are brandishing the name themselves.

“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has.”

The movement is hardly a mass one, and it has taken place mostly online, the digital equivalent of wearing a button with a clever, attention-getting message. A search revealed hundreds of participants across the country, along with a YouTube video and bumper stickers promoting the idea. Legally changing names is too much hassle, participants say, so they use “Hussein” on Facebook and in blog posts and comments on sites like nytimes.com, dailykos.com and mybarackobama.com, the campaign’s networking site.

New Husseins began to crop up online as far back as last fall. But more joined up in February after a conservative radio host, Bill Cunningham, used Mr. Obama’s middle name three times and disparaged him while introducing Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at a campaign rally. (Mr. McCain repudiated Mr. Cunningham’s comments).

The practice has been proliferating ever since. In interviews, several Obama supporters said they dreamed up the idea on their own, with no input from the campaign and little knowledge that others shared their thought.

Some said they were inspired by movies, including “Spartacus,” the 1960 epic about a Roman slave whose peers protect him by calling out “I am Spartacus!” to Roman soldiers, and “In and Out,” a 1997 comedy about a gay high school teacher whose students protest his firing by proclaiming that they are all gay as well.

“It’s one of those things that just takes off, because everybody got it right away,” said Stephanie Miller, a left-leaning comedian who blurted out the idea one day during a broadcast of her syndicated radio talk show and repeated it on CNN.

Ms. Miller and her fellow new Husseins are embracing the traditionally Muslim name even as the Obama campaign shies away from Muslim associations. Campaign workers ushered two women in head scarves out of a camera’s range at a rally this month in Detroit. (The campaign has apologized.) Aides canceled a December appearance on behalf of Mr. Obama by Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and the first Muslim congressman.

Mr. Obama may be more enthusiastic, judging from his response at a Chicago fund-raiser two weeks ago. When he saw that Richard Fizdale, a longtime contributor, wore “Hussein” on his name tag, Mr. Obama broke into a huge grin, Mr. Fizdale said.

Some Obama supporters say they were moved to action because of what their own friends, neighbors and relatives were saying about their candidate. Mark Elrod, a political science professor at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., is organizing students and friends to declare their Husseinhood on Facebook on Aug. 4, Mr. Obama’s birthday.

Ms. Nordling changed her name after volunteering for Mr. Obama before the Kentucky primary.

“People would not listen to what you were saying on the phone or on their doorstep because they thought he was Muslim,” she said.

Ms. Nordling’s uncle liked the idea so much that he joined the same Facebook group that she had. But when her father saw her new online moniker, he was incredulous.

“He actually thought I was going to convert to Islam,” Ms. Nordling said.

"Alinsky Rises Again"

It’s taken me a couple of weeks now to digest the symbolism and significance of the attempted censorship of my June 11 reference to Saul Alinsky and his Rules for Radicals as I continued our international teach-in on the subject of community organizing.

Beyond the evident and fundamental questions that are always raised by censorship, what’s really stuck in my craw is the gross strategic and tactical stupidity that this particular attempt to erase history reflected on the part of the would-be censors.

They - and, they claim, some brain-damaged "potential big donors" - argued that the mere mention of Alinsky, the father of community organizing, in the context of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, would somehow harm his electoral chances in November. And in doing so, they demonstrated exactly why they – including a Democratic National Committee member and superdelegate – and party functionaries like them have been the dimwitted architects of so many losing campaigns in recent decades. They, and they alone, were responsible for their party's abysmal losing streak from 1994 to 2004. And they still think they know better than the rest of us about politics?

They don’t see how that kind of fear-based thinking shrunk their base over the years, leading many millions of Americans that have more in common ideologically with Democrats than Republicans to turn our backs on electoral politics, participation and voting, leaving them empty handed on election night after election night. They don’t “get” that the new wave of millions that flooded the primaries and caucuses among younger voters, alienated voters and never before voters delivered them a different kind of nominee this year precisely because of his community organizer profile that makes Obama visibly and substantially distinct from the standard Democratic Party hack politician that has more often led that party into defeat than victory.

They were offended, I think, by the mention of Alinsky, because under the surface of their misguided know-it-all-ism at politics, they sense that, yes, they really don’t understand what has just happened to their party as a result of the expansion of the base by these new or returned voters. Alinsky’s critique of the Democratic Party during his life is essentially that of so many of us that were turned off to electoral politics during the Clinton era: fearful, equivocating and, too often, corrupted in that very pursuit of large donors.

Since that moment two weeks ago, many Field Hands and others have brought to my attention the many public references to Obama’s community organizing in Chicago - that toddlin’ town where Alinsky developed the craft - that were not censored and clearly helped – not hurt – the candidate to clinch the nomination and, now, jump ahead of his GOP rival by every polling metric.

Look carefully at that cover. Did you notice that subhed? Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. Sounds a lot like “Rules for Radicals,” no? It's clearly in tribute to Alinsky. And this, from the Democrat most responsible for his party’s sudden winning streak that began in 2006: When it came to recruiting, inspiring, generating waves of small donors and volunteers - and creating the online spaces through which they could self-organize - for the new generation of victorious Democrats, Kos has shown that he understands how to get his party to win elections far better than the old guard DNC types that keep telling us, in conflict with all evidence, that it’s they that have the secret decoder ring know-how.

Anyway, Kos went to some expense to send me, express mail across international borders, the galley proofs for the new book this week. The contents are embargoed: I can’t quote from it until September 2. But beyond the turn of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” phrase in the book’s subtitle, y’all will be very interested to buy that book in September and see to whom the book is dedicated, and whose quotation opens the work.

I really hadn’t realized, when I posted that primer on Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, that others were thinking exactly along the same lines of what needs to be done, how to do it, and how adapting upon the innovations by Alinsky and other community organizers provides a key both for those that want to elect Obama as president and also for those that want to remain organized after November to ensure that the change that is promised can and will be delivered.

Interestingly, as the quotations and links I’m about to share with you indicate, some very knowledgeable journalists and columnists have also cited Alinsky in the context of Obama in recent months, causing zero damage to that candidate, and in fact – as the primary results demonstrate – those references helped to distinguish him from the kinds of party buffoons that had branded the reputation for failure upon the forehead of the Democratic Party in the United States.

The person who invented community organizing, at least in its modern form, was Chicagoan Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). Articles about Obama often mention Alinsky and suggest that he has been influenced by him. (Google the two names together and you will get 29,000 hits.) Sometimes Obama is called a disciple, although Alinsky had no use for disciples, acolytes or slavish dedication to schools of thought.

The San Francisco Chronicle (and other newspapers) didn’t try to censor syndicated columnist David Sirota last month:

the more citizens will "become educated about various corporation policies" because they will realize "they can do something about them," as famed shareholder activist Saul Alinsky once said. That is what truly scares Corporate America - and what could bring the most "real change" of all.

Two leading Democratic candidates for president — Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — can trace their political character to teachings handed down indirectly from Alinsky, a community organizer from Chicago, who died in 1972. Alinsky is credited with developing a new approach to politics, using tactics that allowed ordinary people — the poor and disenfranchised — to fight city hall effectively.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn’t try to censor reporter John Iwasaki last month:

The Industrial Areas Foundation was founded in Chicago by Saul Alinsky, whose work influenced Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) and Barack Obama, long before they would become Democratic presidential candidates.

Obama arrived in Chicago in 1985 with a college degree, a map of the city and a new job — community organizer.

Starting salary: Just over $10,000 plus enough money to buy a beat-up Honda.

Obama was a stranger to Chicago, but living abroad gave him experience as an outsider and a natural empathy for people without money and power, says Gerald Kellman, the man who hired him…

"He seemed to listen well and he learned fast," Kellman says. But even though Obama worked with people trained by Saul Alinsky, the father of community organizing, he didn't adopt hard-nose tactics.

"He did not like personal confrontation," Kellman says. "He had no trouble challenging power and challenging people on issues. When it came to face-to-face situations, he valued civility a great deal. ... When it came to negotiating conflict, he was very good at that. ... He was not one to get drawn into a protracted conflict that involves personalities."

Saul Alinsky, the legendary community organizer on the South Side of Chicago who advocated confrontation with the Daley machine… encouraged his groups to engage in civil disobedience if need be… I can remember radicals attacking him for his lack of revolutionary fervor, in the same way, incidentally, they attacked Ralph Nader, who was seen as a patsy for the legal profession. "A guy has to be a political idiot," Alinsky scoffed at radicals back then, "to say all power comes out of the barrel of a gun when the other side has the guns."

Saul Alinsky believed that power flowed up from the streets and was there for the taking, if only people believed they could do so.

These house meetings form the core of the campaign's organizing model. The concept derives from organizing theory as taught by Saul Alinsky and as adopted by community organizers across the country. Never before has a major party presidential campaign used them to expand their support in a general election.

He came to politics through the community organizing movement, whose radical founder, Saul Alinsky, mocked highbrow reformers, and focused instead on the acquisition and use of power, with the ends often justifying the means.

And what about Barack Obama himself?

The drama-queening, off-message, money-grubbing, old guard performance of the past two weeks by one DNC member - in embarrassing email after email that failed to stem the exodus of former readers and what she suddenly recognized as valuable small donations - was often trying to justify its boneheaded behavior in his name, to "protect" Obama from any public acknowledgment of what everybody knows already: that he approached his campaign as a community organizer and did so expanding upon the techniques developed by Alinsky and others. They claimed to be speaking for him (a big no no, as any Obama staffer or fellow will testify), thus attempting to erase and censor, also, the ways he has already spoken for himself on these matters.

Here's something that Obama wrote, at the age of 29, and allowed to be published in a book with - gasp! - the word "Alinsky" in the title:

"Organizing teaches as nothing else does the beauty and strength of everyday people."

Friday, June 27, 2008

"The View from Unity" (with videos)

4:10 p.m. | All Together Now: All in all, it was a positive day for both Senators. They seemed to go out of their way to acknowledge the widely understood reality — that it had been a hard-fought primary, to say the least. But now, they are clearly on the same side. We noticed that both Senators mentioned former President Bill Clinton, and wonder if that was negotiated in advance.

Mrs. Clinton reminded her listeners that he had been elected, twice, an unusual feat for a Democrat in the last few decades, although she did not mention him by name, calling him only someone “I know.”

The crowd got it, and applauded. And Mr. Obama mentioned him too, in a welcoming way, saying the party and the country needed both her and and Mr. Clinton.

We may not see true unity with the Clintons until Mr. Clinton joins Mr. Obama on stage himself. But Mrs. Clinton strongly signaled to her supporters that she is with the program, and that’s important not only for the party but for her future in it.

Anyway, the Senators had good timing. The skies have opened again and now it’s pouring rain. All the electrical power channeled into Unity for this event has been knocked out, and access to the Internet has more or less vanished.

(See the related article by our colleague Jeff Zeleny. He also blogged today about the Clintons’ donation to the Obama campaign.)

3:15 p.m. | Hillary’s Women: So we just met up with a couple of die-hard Clinton supporters who said this unity event had not persuaded them to back Mr. Obama.

Carmella Lewis, 57, a retired ad saleswoman and a Clinton delegate from Denver, was carrying a big “Hillary” sign. She came all the way from Colorado for the event, even though she didn’t believe in it, because she wanted to convey her support to Mrs. Clinton.

“As a politician, she’s got to try to bring the party together,” Ms. Lewis said. “But I have a gut feeling that something’s going to happen so that she becomes the nominee.” She said she would not vote for Mr. Obama and that when he spoke, she stuffed her ears with tissue.

She said that Mrs. Clinton spotted her sign in the crowd and pointed to her and waved. And later, she had Mrs. Clinton autograph her sign and told her, “You’re going to be the next president” and Mrs. Clinton smiled.

Her friend, Freda Smith, 79, a former state representative from Salem, N.H., said Mr. Obama was “not qualified” to be president. “We don’t know anything about him,” she said. “He talks about change, but he never says exactly what he means.”

But many more in the crowd said they were entirely happy with Mr. Obama and pleased with Mrs. Clinton’s support.

Dan Wasserman, 59, a darkroom technician from Massachusetts, said he found her speech convincing and even thought it was better than Mr. Obama’s. But he said he’s ready to vote for Mr. Obama.

His wife, B.J. Roche, 53, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Massachusetts, said she was always an Obama fan because she opposed the war in Iraq and would never have favored someone who voted for it, like Mrs. Clinton.

“I thought she was fabulous today, and it must have been hard,” she said. “But I don’t get her supporters. I don’t get their anger. Obama did win.”

Thursday, June 26, 2008

He's still "our guy": "Obama's goals"

Rolling Stone gets Obama to give the most succinct explanation of his goals as president:

WENNER: "Is there a marker you would lay down at the end of your first term where you say, ‘If this has happened or not happened, I would consider it a negative mark on my governance’?"

OBAMA: "If I haven’t gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal health care and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we’ve missed the boat. Those are three big jobs, so it’s going to require a lot of attention and imagination, and it’s going to require the American people feeling inspired enough that they’re prepared to take on these big challenges."

Rolling Stone has a truncated version of that article here, though the quote above is taken from here.

"Five Myths About the New Wiretapping Law"

Sometime today (maybe not-Howie), the Senate is likely to approve the most comprehensive overhaul of American surveillance law since the Watergate era. Unless you're a government lawyer, a legal scholar, a masochist, or an insomniac, chances are you haven't read the 114-page bill.

. Don't beat yourself up: Neither have most of the 293 House members who voted for it last week. Ditto the mainstream press, who seem to have relied chiefly on summaries provided by the same lawmakers who hadn't read it.

To be fair, wiretapping is so classified, and the language of the bill so opaque, that no one without a "top secret" clearance can say with any authority just how much surveillance the proposal will authorize the government to do. (The best assessment yet comes from former Justice Department official David Kris, who deems the legislation "so intricate" that it risks confusing even "the government officials who must apply it.")

Out of the echo chamber of ignorance and self-serving political cant, a number of myths have begun to emerge. We may never know for sure everything that this new legislation entails. But here are a few things that it most certainly doesn't.

Myth No. 1: This bill is a compromise.

The House bill "is the result of a compromise," one of its architects, Steny Hoyer, D-Md., maintained the other day. But in truth, Hoyer and his colleagues gave the White House most of what it asked for, dramatically expanding the government's surveillance capabilities without demanding any serious concessions in exchange. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., calls the deal "a capitulation," and he's right. Why else would the White House express its approval so quickly, after a full year in which President Bush petulantly vowed not to sign any legislation that obliged him to concede too much? Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., offered an honest appraisal: "I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped."

Myth No. 2: We need the bill to intercept our enemies abroad.

One frequent refrain in favor of the new legislation is that without it, America's intelligence capabilities will dry up, leaving the country vulnerable to attack. The National Security Agency wants to intercept communications that pass through routers in the United States, even when both parties to the communication are abroad. The administration has argued that the NSA should not have to obtain a court order to intercept those communications. Seems reasonable, right?

Of course it's reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that House Democrats proposed to fix the problem a year ago. They were rebuffed. Why? Because their plan contained too much judicial oversight. (They ended up folding, just as they have this time around.) So when people say that this legislation is all about exempting foreign-to-foreign communications that happen to pass through the United States from the warrant requirement, don't buy it.

You see, the new law goes a lot further, basically doing away with warrants altogether in the domestic-to-international context. Under the proposal, the NSA can engage in what David Kris calls "vacuum cleaner surveillance" of phone calls and e-mails entering and leaving the United States through our nation's telecom switches. Provided that the "target" of the surveillance is reasonably believed to be abroad, the NSA can intercept a massive volume of communications, which might, however incidentally, include yours. When authorities want to target purely domestic communications, they still have to apply for a warrant from the FISA court (albeit only after a weeklong grace period of warrantless surveillance). But where communications between the United States and another country are concerned, the secret court is relegated to a vestigial role, consulted on the soundness of the "targeting procedures," but not on the legitimacy of the targets themselves.

This is a huge departure from FISA. As Glenn Greenwald argues in Salon, the underlying suggestion of the new proposal is "not that the FISA law is obsolete, but rather, that the key instrument imposed by the Founders to preserve basic liberty—warrants—is something that we must now abolish."

Myth No. 3:The courts will still review the telecom cases.

Perhaps most controversially, the bill effectively pardons the telecom giants that assisted the Bush administration in the warrantless wiretapping program. They will now be shielded from dozens of civil lawsuits brought against them after their involvement was exposed. House Democrats insist that the telecoms are not automatically getting off the hook. Instead, the companies must go before a federal judge. But here's the catch: For the suits against them to be "promptly dismissed," they must demonstrate to the judge not that what they did was legal but only that the White House told them to do it.

This is another bit of face-saving window dressing, and its essence is best captured in a breathtaking remark from Sen. Bond: "I'm not here to say that the government is always right. But when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree … that is something you need to do." That more or less sums it up—one part Nuremberg defense, the other part Nixon.

Myth No. 4: The Democrats must fold because of the November election.

It's no secret that congressional Democrats wanted to resolve the FISA debate before the August convention in order to avoid the perennial charge that they're softies. After the House vote last week, Barack Obama issued a statement backing off his earlier tough stance on telecom immunity. The calculus seemed clear: McCain had just reversed his own position on illegal wiretapping and was spoiling for a fight, arguing that "House Democrats, the ACLU, and the trial lawyers have held up legislation to modernize our nation's terrorist surveillance laws." You can't stand with the trial lawyers and the ACLU if you want to win a general election.

But does it really make sense to stand with AT&T and George W. Bush instead? As the Anonymous Liberal blogger pointed out, you could hardly ask for a more disreputable opposing team than a president with historic-low popularity and a bunch of corporate fat cats. And by reneging on his earlier position, Obama put himself in a box: If he lets the bill sail through the Senate, he will alienate his base. But if he attempts a filibuster or an amendment now, he will appear to be pandering to the objections of Moveon.org and other groups. It would have made more sense for the party leadership and the nominee to stick to their guns.

Myth No. 5: The law will be the "exclusive means" for surveillance.

The Democrats' most pathetic bit of self-deluded posturing involves the inclusion of a clause suggesting that the new law represents the "exclusive means" by which "electronic surveillance and interception of certain communications may be conducted." According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., this means "the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president." But, then, FISA always said that it was the "exclusive means." And in 2001, pretty much on a whim, the president set it aside. So for those of you keeping score back home, the Democratic leadership is patting itself on the back for including in the new law a provision that was already in the old law—and which the Bush White House chose to ignore.

Here, then, is the bitter joke of the new legislation: From 2001 to 2007, the NSA engaged in a secret program that was a straightforward violation of America's wiretapping laws. Since the program was revealed, the administration has succeeded in preventing the judiciary from making a definitive declaration that the wiretapping was a crime. Suits against the government get dismissed on state-secrets grounds, because while the program may have been illegal, it was also so highly classified that its legality can never be litigated in open court. And now suits against the telecoms will by dismissed en masse as well. Meanwhile, the new law moves the goal posts, taking illegal things the administration was doing and making them legal.

Whatever Hoyer and Pelosi—and even Obama—say, this amounts to a retroactive blessing of the illegal program, and historically it means that the country will probably be deprived of any rigorous assessment of what precisely the administration did between 2001 and 2007. No judge will have an opportunity to call the president's willful violation of a federal statute a crime, and no landmark ruling by the courts can serve as a warning for future generations about government excesses in dangerous times. What's more, because the proposal so completely plays into the Bush conception of executive power, it renders meaningless any of its own provisions.

After all, if the main lesson of the wiretapping scandal is that we need more surveillance power for the government, what is to stop President Bush—or President Obama or President McCain—from one day choosing to set this new law aside, too? "How will we be judged?" Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., asked in a stirring speech deploring the legislation yesterday. "The technical argument obscures the defining question: the rule of law, or the rule of men?"

"US Senator Says FISA Vote Likely Will Slip To July"

U.S. Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin said Thursday that the Senate likely will not vote this week on authorizing electronic surveillance powers for the president.

Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters Thursday that Democratic leaders plan to wait until July take up the bill, which rewrites the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Durbin said that Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a leading opponent of the bill, has asked that the Senate delay consideration of the bill.

"Sen. Feingold wants additional time, and he would like to postpone it until after the Fourth of July," Durbin said.

The FISA bill is the result of a compromise between Democrats and Republicans on immunity for telecommunications companies. Lawmakers had differed on whether phone companies that are believed to have cooperated with government requests to access customer phone calls and e-mails should be granted immunity from civil lawsuits.

An agreement reached last week would ensure that a district court review the written authorizations handed to the phone companies from the administration stating the program had been approved by the president and the attorney general.

Feingold has said that he plans to offer an amendment to the bill to remove the immunity protections, which posed a major obstacle to attempts to quickly the pass the bill before the end of the week.

Durbin also reiterated statements made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Wednesday that the Senate likely would not vote a comprehensive housing package before a 1-week recess set to begin at the end of the week.

Reid Thursday said the Senate will stay in session until they vote on two remaining items: a supplemental spending package and a bill to set reimbursement rates for physicians under Medicare.

Reid aides have held out the possibility that the Senate could remain in session until Sunday to hold a procedural vote on the Medicare reimbursement bill - a move that appears intended to force Senate Republicans to agree to a final vote on the bill.

Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., Thursday objected to a motion by Reid to pass the bill, saying Republicans would prefer a 30-day extension of current Medicare law.

The FISA Cloture vote just passed. This limits debate to 30 hours, then the bill will be voted on. That means a real filibuster is now impossible. Various motions will be put forward to strip immunity, odds are they will fail. Then a number of the 80 who voted to restrict debate will vote against FISA so they can say they were against the bill. However this was the real vote, and the rest is almost certainly nothing but Kabuki for the rubes. Clinton, McCain and Obama all did not show for the vote.